At that point, each person has the choice of returning to Earth or continuing adventures among the stars. Onward Stations around the world collect the dead and shoot them off into space in a geyser of white light. The stories in Kéthani explore the ramifications of the aliens' arrival on a small group of friends from the village of Oxenworth, England, who often meet at a pub called the Fleece.

A man named Khalid narrates the "interludes" connecting each story and also appears in some of the stories. Most of the tales tackle the implications of the choice of accepting the implant or rejecting it, often in personal, emotional terms. For example, "Onward Station" is a teacher's account of a romantic relationship with an 18-year-old student named Claudine. She does not have an implant and believes that the world and life are basically banal and disappointing, and that "love doesn't last." Tragedy ensues. "The Kéthani Inheritance" involves another man who falls in love at the same time his tyrannical father dies, causing complications because eventually the father will return to Earth and confront the narrator.

This trend continues with stories like "Thursday's Child," in which a daughter with cancer doesn't have an implant due to the mother's belief that she won't go to heaven if she has one. Tragedy ensues. The author interrupts this pattern, and the run of first-person narrators, with "The Touch of Angels," in which the aliens actually make an appearance as complications arise from a puzzling murder case ... the solution to which turns out to be somewhat banal (an offhand "enemies of the aliens" explanation isn't convincing). However, "The Wisdom of the Dead" provides greater complexity and expands the reader's understanding of the aliens, as do some of the other later stories.

Too many tiring repetitions

Theoretically, I should like Kéthani a lot. Eric Brown focuses on the internal, emotional lives of his characters, he attempts to create genuine connections among the various people in the book, and his writing style is clear and readable. However, several authorial decisions work against these strengths. First, almost all of the stories are related by first-person narrators, and most of these characters sound very much like each other. Certain character situations also echo throughout the book, most notably the dysfunctional marriage/relationship and the lonely person seeking connection. The suicide or death of characters in too many stories seems like a perfunctory way of tying off loose ends. Taken singly, several of these stories would be noteworthy, but the negative way in which they cross-pollinate one other creates a weakening sense of sameness and stasis.

The general offstage presence of the aliens in Kéthani creates a certain sparseness, too, in that their effects are only alluded to—with every story being set in the same place, it's hard to show firsthand evidence of, for example, the "anti-Kéthani riots in Islamabad." Brown's "interludes" between stories attempt to provide more context, but they try too hard. The approach doesn't seem organic, and I never believed on a paragraph level that these interludes were anything other than a clunky attempt to make the book seem more like a novel. A coda at the end beginning "A thousand years have passed since the events described in the preceding documents" doesn't help, since this ultimate effort to provide closure simply emphasizes how much we don't know and aren't told about both the aliens and the situation on Earth during the events described in the actual stories.

I've always found Brown to be a thoughtful, honest and talented fiction writer. While Kéthani contains ample evidence of that talent in some individual stories—the themes he deals with are powerful—the repetition, underwritten context and anonymous similarity among the narrators of the stories strip away the energy and variety required to make this project a real success. That said, I eagerly look forward to Brown's next novel.